The Box at the Back of the Closet
by salingergurl
Summary: This was written for an LJ challenge on vmlyricfic. Logan finds a box of trinkets and contemplates the contents. Slight LoVe. Comments are love!


A Box at the Back of the Closet

A Box at the Back of the Closet

Logan thought he'd thrown all that shit out long ago. Turns out, he still had one shoe box left. A shoe box he'd shoved as far into the back of his closet as humanly possible. If his father hadn't been making him give some of his old crap to some stupid charity for PR, he'd never even have found it. "Your mom just jumped off a bridge. How do you think that makes us look?" _How romantic,_ he remembered thinking, _Mom barely even buried and already concerned about PR._ So now here he sat, box on his lap. _Might as well open it up_, he thought_. See what's inside. _

_God, it's like a pre-pubescent time capsule in here, _he mused as he removed each object from the box and examined it. The ticket stub from the first movie he and Lilly had seen together, _Oceans 11_. She'd commanded they see it because, "Young girl. George Clooney. Brad Pitt. Matt Damon. Hello? I'm there!" Logan dealt with it because there was action and secretly, he loved Brad Pitt. In a completely hetero way. Turned out they didn't even watch much of the movie, just sat in the back corner and played dirty for an hour and 56 minutes. After that, they decided maybe going to the movies wasn't the best use of money or time, especially when Logan had a big house practically to himself, not to mention a pool house. Needless to say, there weren't many movie tickets in the box.

Then there was a strip of pictures from one of those photo booths. The obligatory couple thing to do. By the fourth frame, Lilly was flashing the camera, the obligatory Lilly thing to do. He missed that about her. He missed that in his life: someone who was completely free and who challenged him to be more. Just… _more_.

He rifled through some old papers of some description or another, most of them random dirty notes Lilly left around for Logan to find, a plot carefully constructed to make him horny at the most inopportune times. One of them had been left in his algebra book, another was left in the notes for his oral presentation, one was in his gym locker - _that_ one was embarrassing…. Lilly made Logan's life exciting and full of possibility, mostly the possibility of sex at any moment. A possibility young Logan always hoped would become a reality.

Then there were the things Logan had never given Lilly.

A love letter he'd written in the first month of their relationship, reflecting perhaps the most perfect moments they'd ever had. She cheated on him for the first time shortly after that, and he never gave her the letter. But it didn't mean he never felt what he'd written. He read the letter again, but stopped before the tears pooling in his eyes could leak out. He'd cried enough about Lilly, in private of course; this was not supposed to be about her. He'd loved her, she was dead. This, if anything, was about moving on.

There was a shitty mix tape he made her, before he became computer savvy enough to burn a CD. It was a horrible compilation of sappy songs about love. What did he know about it then, anyway? He turned the cassette tape over in his hands, thinking about the day he'd made it, and the moment, two days later, when he decided not to give it to her. He had told her he loved her and she didn't say it back. No "I love you," no mixed tape. It made sense at the time. Still, he was glad he'd never given it to her. She would have laughed at him. Logan was always the one in love, Lilly was the one having fun. That was their understanding, and, because he loved her, he let her do what she wanted. Maybe she loved him, maybe she didn't, but she always came back to him. She didn't need his sappy love crap, she just needed _him_.

Logan was never in the habit of examining coincidences or being thoughtful, but for some reason, he felt things changing in his life. Realizing his mother was really gone in the lobby of the Neptune Grand, breaking down, finally feeling his heart broken; it had changed him. Veronica being there to hold him while he cried… well, that changed him too. So maybe all this reminiscing was for a reason. Or maybe he was just hung over from last night. Either way, Logan was actually examining the contents of the box he'd found, and thinking about what the items had meant to him, and to Lilly, as they were back then. Now she was dead and he was different, but they had been innocent once. No, that wasn't the right word. They had been carefree and adolescent, young and seemingly in love, and the world was full of possibilities. Now, the world had narrowed into one single recurring thought: _She's dead_. The "she" used to be Lilly. Now it was also his mom.

There were a few items in the box from her too. The baseball ticket from the day his dad threw the opening pitch at the Sharks game, when Logan was 12. They'd all gone to the game, even Trina, and sat in an executive box, pretending they were a normal American family watching normal American baseball. For those few hours, it seemed like they were.

There was a wedding picture she'd given him; she was holding a glass of champagne and laughing, not paying attention to the camera. She looked so happy, and she really had been, then. It was her favorite picture of herself, but a far cry from the woman Logan knew. The only thing he recognized was the glass of champagne in her hand. That seemed familiar. Still, Logan believed she had been happy once, and this picture was proof. It was nice to believe it could have been the truth.

He found a birthday card she'd given him on his 13th birthday, when he officially became a teenager. She'd written a message inside, something about how much she loved him, and how he was a man now and she knew he'd make her proud, blah, blah. Stuff moms say. He knew if he read it again, he would break down. And Veronica wasn't here to hold him while he cried. No one was anymore.

Veronica. She'd tried to find his mother; he believed Veronica wanted to find her as much as Logan wanted her to be found. Veronica had believed she was still alive; it was a good feeling. Someone else believing. And yeah, it was Veronica, and of course, they'd been through some stuff but she'd been _there_. Since he moved to Neptune, she'd been _there_. Always, even when he pushed her away because of Lilly's death, she'd been there, and he'd only recently come to realize how much Veronica had been hurt by Lilly's death. Maybe, even, more than he had been. Maybe.

_Why am I thinking about Veronica, anyway? Just get some shit for Dad and go play video games. That's the task at hand._ He left the box open on his bed, grabbed some shirts and pants he never wore, tossed them in a bag and threw them in the hall. _He can take 'em to the car himself_.

He walked away and called Dick. He needed a distraction.

After Dick kicked his ass at game after game, and they'd ogled his step-mom by the pool for an hour, Logan decided to head back home. _Dad'll probably be gone to some charity thing. I'll have the house to myself._

These days, having the house to himself meant Logan thought about the person missing from it. Or the people. Sometimes he thought he heard Lilly laughing in the next room, or his mom pouring a drink. He knew these were just fantasies, but liked hearing them anyway.

Logan went straight to his room to change and saw the box lying open on his bed, just as he'd left it. It drew him in again, and he sat down. _I need to finish this. _He fished through every item left in the box, each one meaningful in some small way. He contemplated throwing them out, eliminating them from his life and hoping it would rid him of the memories still haunting him. These tiny trinkets were the very least of things he'd received from Lilly and his mom, yet these two women showed him the most love he'd ever known. They shaped his life more than anyone else. He had to be grateful to them.

There was one more woman, though. One more he needed to thank. He walked over to his dresser where his checkbook lay open. He carefully ripped out the carbon copy of the check he'd written to Mars Investigations, the one he'd written to pay Veronica for trying to find his mom. "Your mom was always nice to me," she'd said.

He took the homecoming picture out of its frame, the one of him and Lilly and Duncan and Veronica, and peeled off the sticker he'd put over Veronica's face. She wasn't the enemy—she never had been; he knew that now. She'd helped him, and she'd been there for him. She'd held him, for Christ's sake, and let him cry. She'd ripped up the check. She tried, and she'd given him hope for a little while, and it was worth more to both of them than money.

Something told him they would be linked to each other forever. Something told him there was more holding them together than the memory of dead women, more to their story than deaths and pain. There might be a happy ending somewhere down the line for both of them. Maybe it was because of Lilly. Or his mom. Or both. He set the photograph and check receipt on the bed.

He found his mother's lighter, the one he'd thought was a sign she was still alive, and he held it for a moment in his hands. Logan was not religious, but he thought heaven sounded nice, surely his mom had made it there. Maybe she looked like her wedding photograph again.

Logan dug Lilly's obituary out of his wallet; he'd kept it there for nearly two years. Why, he never really knew. It just felt right. But suddenly, it didn't anymore.

Logan took the items, the obituary and the lighter, the photograph, and the carbon copy of the check, and placed each of them, along with everything else he'd taken out, back in the box. He shoved it back to its hiding place, once again forgotten in the back of his massive closet. He closed the door, hesitating for a moment.

_Thank you_, he whispered.

Your object: Cassette tape  
Your lyric: "the least they ever gave you / Was the most you ever knew" from_ Acoustic #3_


End file.
